Maybe one part of the Harry Potter series could come to "Muggle world."

A Michigan Tech professor is moving forward with research that could hide objects from plain sight with an invisability cloak.

"It's not like the Harry Potter cloak," said Elena Semouchkina, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan Tech. "There’s real stuff you need to do."

Semouchkina and Xiaohui Wang, a graduate student at Michigan Tech, published papers on two different types of cloaks this year. Their research joins others across the country looking how to hide objects from the human eye.

"The quality may not be 100 percent," Semouchkina said, "but it creates the image efficiently."

The theory behind the cloaks play with how people observe light. When we see an object, it's light hitting and bouncing off the object to our eyes. The materials on the cloak manipulate how light bounces off of an object and how we see it.

The first type of cloak they experimented with at Michigan Tech would use artificial materials to speed up microwave waves and bend them around the object to make it appear invisible. They use dielectric resonators to do this.

The microwave frequencies are bent "to arrive to the observer’s eye simultaneously with waves traveling in free space along straight trajectories that would give off the appearance of an invisible object," Semouchkina said.

The second type of cloak, however, is considered to be lighter and more efficient. The cloak would have multilayer coating on a natural material. That coating would interact with the light waves, scatter them and cancel each other out, giving off the appearance of being invisible.

This new type of cloak outperforms the previous cloak. It has less reflection and shadows and is eight to nine times thinner, Semouchkina said.

While there are no working prototypes as of yet, the research shows that "suitable materials are readily available to implement the cloak," Semouchkina said.

The cloak technology could be used in various applications.

Note: This article previously contained incorrect applications for the cloaking device. Those have been removed. Also, the post said that researchers are using light waves; right now, they are using microwave frequencies.